Leaked audio: Labour MPs mock National rivals as ‘duck-sized horses’ and ‘sitting ducks’ in unusual training session
Sunday, 24 May 2026
Leaked audio reveals Labour MPs mocking National rivals during a training exercise, with Barbara Edmonds calling Finance Minister Nicola Willis a 'duck-faced horse.'
Backbencher Greg O'Connor criticized the previous Ardern/Hipkins governments, stating their chief of staff operation was 'a little bit lacking.'
The tape catches MPs debating election tactics, including plans to systematically discredit senior National MPs and arguments over the timing of policy releases.
A bizarre audio recording from an internal Labour training session has been leaked and reveals senior Labour MPs referring to National MPs as duck-sized horses. Yes, duck-sized horses.
The audio, leaked to a number of media outlets, contains an exercise in which MPs and candidates are asked whether they’d rather fight a hundred duck-sized horses or a horse-sized duck.
The question was submitted by a Labour Party member as part of a question and answer session.
Senior Wellington based Labour MPs take up the challenge alongside other candidates to varying degrees of success.
Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds talks about her Chinese heritage and says “we love duck”. She then refers to National counterpart, finance minister Nicola Willis, as a “duck-faced horse”.
“Every week I have to stand up in the house and ask a duck-faced horse - did I get that right? - questions every single week,” Edmonds said.
“And we’ve started to do it quite successfully, just by being able to prod them.”
Campaign chair Kieran McAnulty said they were up against a hundred duck-sized horses.
“Because horses are full of shit,” he said.
Education spokesperson Ginny Andersen said she’d rather fight one horse-sized duck.
“Because Christopher Luxon is a sitting duck, and we are coming for you,” Andersen said.
Health Spokesperson Ayesha Verrall fashioned her answer into a song - to the tune of Old Town Road by Lil Nas X.
“I’m gonna take my duck to the old town pond, I’m gonna ride ‘til I can’t no more,” she sings. You can listen to this snippet below.
Backbencher Greg O’Connor pipes up calling the National party benches “clones”.
“They could be ducks, they all look the same and you knock one down and another one pops up so you’ve just got to know that 100 sized ducks is what we are fighting, those little little ducks so they all look the same and you’ve just gotta fight them all and make sure none of the others pop up.”
The leaked audio also contains discussions about how Labour frames itself in the election and how to learn lessons from the past.
Edmonds also believes knocking their opponents down is a winning strategy.
“I believe one of the ways that we can fight those hundred, or the big one, is you actually need to start to discredit them as a caucus and as a group start to knock them down one by one, those, particularly those senior ones,” she said.
Earlier in the conversation, O’Connor took aim at staff in the previous Labour government saying they were lacking a figure like Heather Simpson who served as Helen Clark’s chief of staff.
“We never had a Heather Simpson,” he said. “You’ll never get a better chairman of the board, Jacinda was there - great leader, but what we’ve always got to have is that one person who has a really good understanding, not necessarily an elected person, that go-to person who understands, have got this incredible knowledge of how everything is working and pulls it all together.
He said the chief of staff serving in the Ardern/Hipkins government was “a little bit lacking”. It’s unclear whether O’Connor is referring to Ardern’s long time chief of staff Raj Nahna, or Chris Hipkins’ chief of staff, Andrew Kirton.
O’Connor has never found himself in the running for a ministerial role. He also lost the nomination for the Wellington North electorate.
During the discussion, campaign chair McAnulty mounts a defence of not releasing fulsome policy until after the budget.
“It’s because we need to know the fiscal situation before we can be confident in what we promise, and if we promise it we’re confident we can deliver it.”
Verrall said those who were saying Labour both did too much and needed to be more specific about their promises were right, but so were those who were arguing they should be proud of their achievements.
“We just have to stop undermining ourselves by saying there’s more to do the moment we announce something,” Verrall said.